The Lost Sailors: From Aboriginals to Schumpeter

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0:58David McWilliams: you have to understand human nature this podcast is powered by a cast how you doing there it is time for the second or maybe third podcast from down which is it i i don't know john i'm not too sure now but today john has been fascinated just before we got on air dear listener, John is amazed by the sound of the birds behind me. I am in a rainforest, John, a rainforest. I know, it looks amazing. Just listen to the birds. Listen to the exotic creatures. Actually, look at the one behind you now. Look, look, look. Where, where, where, where? He was just on that branch. Okay, so today, just relax there, relax, hold your hour.

1:51David McWilliams: Before we get involved with exotic birds and species of flora and fauna and all that sort of thing. You thought you were listening to an economics podcast. David Attenborough. David Mack Attenborough. Now, stop. Before we do this, I'm going to give you the roadmap. Okay, dear listener. What we're going to talk about is the first people who arrived here and how they were incredibly technologically advanced when they arrived and how they diffused themselves and changed the landscape here and colonized this country. And yet when the Europeans arrived, the Europeans thought of the Aboriginals or the Australians as being primitive Stone Age, etc.

2:31Why was that? We're going to talk about why the clash of civilizations occurred. We're going to talk about the organizational technology that has money and why maybe money explains why these two civilizations were so different. And then we're going to end the podcast discussing this week's Nobel Prize for economics, which tries to reward people who tried to explain what the elixir of innovation is. And John and I are going to put them right. Isn't that right, John? Of course, as always. So where do you want to start? Let's start at the beginning, I suppose. All right. So anthropologists and ancient historians date Australia as the oldest unmolested continent in the world.

3:17It's about 50 or 60 million years old, as it is, in terms of there's been no massive geological change for 50 or 60 million years old. It has only been populated by humans and a small bunch of humans, and we're going to talk about them, for about 60 ,000 years. If you look at the colonization of Australia by humans, and you

3:44David McWilliams: say it's dated about 60 ,000 years ago, it means that European settlement here in Australia, for 97.7 % of all the time there were humans on this continent, the Aborigines had it to themselves. Yeah. Humans have only been here, if you were to look at a percentage, from 0.3 % of the time that all humans have been here. It's incredible, isn't it? It's a fascinating story. And the reason, of course, there are so many exotic plants and flowers here is because up until recently, there were very few predators. Up until recently, this place was a sort of a Garden of Eden, in a way. I want to say a Garden of Eden.

4:29It is a huge amount of its desert.

4:32David McWilliams: But the interesting thing about desert, and you'll know from your environmental things, is things grow in deserts. You know, insects and all sorts of creatures find their home. Yeah, deserts are not dead environments. They're very much alive. But the thing about Australia is that there were predators, but it was an ecosystem that was in balance and that worked until the Europeans came with rodents, rats, mice, rabbits in particular, and devastated the place. So that's what we're going to talk about. Uninvited invaders is going to be our subject of our podcast today. We're going to start with, I think, one of the most momentous events in human history that nobody talks about.

5:18David McWilliams: and it's pretty much changed the course of this continent's human history. And it's when humans first arrived here, how they arrived here, who they were, who their people became, what their culture was, etc. Because amazingly, in the history of Australia, the First Nations people, their history has been largely erased. The Aborigines. Now, interestingly, they're recovering it now And there's a huge guilt complex about it. But the question is, who were these people? How did they come here? This is the most fascinating thing. When did they come here? So up until the first half of the 20th century, anthropologists and historians suggested that the Aborigines were here for about 500 years before the first arrival of Westerners, British under Captain Cook, 1770.

6:15David McWilliams: So just mark that. Right, 1710. And then there was a suggestion that they might be a bit older. And then something bizarre happened in the 1960s, John. A geologist called Jim Bowler from the Australian National University of Canberra was poking around in New South Wales. Yeah. And he finds something in a sandbag, and it's a skeleton of a woman. This is in the 1960s when they thought the Aborigines were here for maybe a few hundred years, maybe a thousand years, right? the carbon date the skeleton in 1969 reveals the woman had died 23 000 years ago 23 000 years ago right now subsequently they found more and more skeletons more and more remains and the evidence points that people arrived here either 45 000 years ago or 60 000 years ago right that is amazing That's quite a difference.

7:07David McWilliams: It's quite a difference, yeah, from 400 to 60 ,000 years ago. Now, the question is, if humans arrived here 60 ,000 years ago, who were they? Because the fascinating thing is that humans who are here couldn't have evolved indigenously here. They must have come from somewhere else. Yeah. And then you think, okay, they came from what is now East Timor in Indonesia. And that's a distance of about 100 miles overseas. Yeah. If it was 60 ,000 years ago, how did they come here? And then the question is, did they come here and one geezer in a raft and he's out fishing one day and the raft gets blown off course and suddenly he arrives in Australia and then have the wherewithal to go right back to East Timor, another 100 miles, get his mates to come over.

7:54Yeah.

7:55David McWilliams: So that's kind of not plausible. Then the second thing is, maybe it was a man and a woman who got lost on a raft and both of them came here and started a colony? Plausible, but not really. Or could it have been that they set out maybe 25 of them or 100 of them in various rafts to come here? Because there must have been that moment where humans reproduced here and began to create what became the Aboriginal population. But this is a massive imponderable in anthropology. Because the chances of it happening are so slim. And they're so slim because of the absolute fact that there's no evidence of any other humans sailing long distance 60 ,000 years ago.

8:48That's the key. So if you think about how we, 60 ,000 years ago, began to spread around the world, we walked out of Africa. We didn't sail out of Africa. And we know that Australia was never joined to the rest of the landmass. There's no evidence that Australia was joined. It's not like Ireland, for example, was attached to Britain. Britain was attached to Europe. And at some stage when the ice melted,

9:17David McWilliams: the sea cut Ireland off. But punters walked to Ireland. They didn't walk here. So that's the first kind of bizarre thing. Second bizarre thing is that these people were obviously sailing before anybody else. Yeah. Now what is really intriguing is they forgot how to sail. By the time the Brits arrived here, they'd lost that ability. And that is a massive imponderable for evolution because it doesn't make any evolutionary sense. But was it the fact that when they arrived in Australia, as it was then, it was the land of plenty and they didn't need to go back? There was no impetus for them to sail back or to go find new land?

9:58Probably.

9:59David McWilliams: But that in and of itself is kind of fascinating. Yeah. So I'm here in a rainforest. You've got the beach culture, you know, a couple of miles away. You've got the desert. You've scrub. It can be unbelievably hot. It can be temperate. The climate is harsh. What you have is a population, an Aboriginal population, that colonized this place. Yeah, and adapted to each of those environments. Yeah. So these are amazing people at one level, right? There's a great chapter in Sapiens, the book by Hariri, which talks about the impact on the local flora and fauna and the marsupial population following the arrival of the first humans.

10:44David McWilliams: And it makes the point, he makes the point that in the first 5 ,000 years of humans being here, you see a massive disappearance of all sorts of other mammals. Yeah. Because they had no idea that the humans, despite the fact that we, when the English arrived, they found the aboriginals very backward and primitive. Okay, we'll go on to that in a second. But the humans are the most vicious predator in the world. Yeah. We are more dangerous to other animals than any other animal. And these aboriginals were humans. And what made the difference is we could speak. And when you could speak, you could organize yourself into gangs and groups and instruct each other and all that sort of stuff.

11:23So all that evolutionary stuff about the voice box and how important it is. But what is intriguing to me is that the indigenous people of Australia are directly related to people who sailed across here tens of thousands years ago. And they were and are, in effect, kind of invisible people. The fact that they dispersed, they colonized this place, it's regarded now that they have the oldest language in the world. That Aboriginal language, which is still spoken, is the oldest language in the world because it's completely unmolested.

12:00David McWilliams: They've been on their own here for 60 ,000 years. Again, I put that figure out there. For the first 99.7 % of human habitation in Australia, the Aborigines had the place of themselves. That's an amazing statistic. and you know it's almost the start of the story because they arrived here they conquered it they spread with amazing swiftness they obviously developed strategies and patterns to be able to colonize this place and to be able to live here this is an extraordinary cultural achievement and all we hear is that they were backward and they were primitive and and when cook arrived what they couldn't believe was the aborigines had no chiefs they didn't seem to have any elders Right.

12:46They had no possessions at all. They had no houses. Right. So there was no structures here. They had no agriculture, right? All these things that we think of as human progress and normal things, you know, so for example. Why was that? I mean, you know, is it because they had everything and were they happy?

13:05David McWilliams: Now, interesting you say, were they happy, right? I mean, reading this amazing book, John. So for people who are interested in this, I've been booked by a woman called Inga Klen-Dinnen. It's called Dancing with Strangers. Now, I'll tell you, it's a beautiful book because it's basically the account of the moment of which the Brits arrived, 1778. Right. The first fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour. So 1770, the cook arrives, but by 1778, they get a colony going, right? There was about 1 ,000 British men and convicts. And this is a quote. These people mixed with ours, this is one of the British observers, and all hands danced together.

13:42David McWilliams: And it's about this beautiful moment where for the first four or five months, because the Brits were inveterate note takers. Yeah. There was this lovely period of discovery between the aboriginals, let's call them the Australians, and the British. The first thing about when the Brits arrived, the aborigines didn't take any notice of them. And here's the quote from a guy called Banks, who was with Cook on the Endeavour, right? He said they scarcely lifted their eyes from their employment, right? So it was a whole bunch of Australians sitting on the beach, and they were fishing. And this huge, big British ship arrives in, like a massive thing they'd never seen before.

14:21David McWilliams: And the Australians didn't, they just, okay, fair enough, there they come, right? They didn't even look at them. They just glanced up and looked as if it was a plasian cloud. They just returned to their task. And the first Brits who arrived here were kind of intrepid. They were curious. They were biologists. They were kind of weirdos, and they kind of loved this idea. and Cook says something interesting about them. This is from Cook's journal. He says, they, the Australians, may appear to some to be the most wretched people on earth, but in reality, they are far happier than we Europeans. They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by inequality of condition.

14:58David McWilliams: The earth and the sea of their own accord furnish them with all the necessary things for life. They seem to set no value upon anything we gave them, Nor would they ever part with anything that was their own. So they had no possessions. Right. Channeling their inner John Lennon. Although John Lennon, imagine no possessions, had a fleet of 20 fucking Rolls Royces. Big spoover. And then he said, and this is very sad for what subsequently happened to the Australian indigenous people, he says, all they seem to want for us is to be gone. And there was no chance of that. And we know what happened. What happened is exactly what happened to the native indigenous Americans, the Mesoamericans, the Aztecs, the Indicates.

15:42Although the people and the colonists proved to be very cruel and appalling, what killed them was smallpox, was diseases. They had no resistance because they were isolated. They had no resistance to smallpox, pleurisy, syphilis, chickenpox, flu, and this killed

16:02David McWilliams: them in their hundreds of thousands. So much so that they think the best estimates was there was an Aboriginal population of 300 ,000 here, maybe as high as a million. When the Brits arrived, there were no more than 50 ,000 of them 20 years later. Wow. Or 30 years later. And that's the sort of environmental holocaust that was visited upon the Latin American Indians as well. Yeah. And of course the reason is isolation yeah if you look at the fascinating fact about human history is that 10 000 years ago when we decided to settle down i always think humans you know after the ice age were kind of like part-time gardeners and human historians of population historians say that about 10 000 years ago there was about four million humans in the earth about 5 000 years ago there was only five million humans on the earth and then from 5 000 years ago to the time of christ population increased to 100 million and that was our immune system got used to these diseases the aboriginals didn't have that yeah so they were wiped out within decades which is an extraordinary story but what intrigues me john is why did these people who could sail 50 000 years ago seem to stop evolving so that when the British arrived here they seemed like stone age people to them yeah that that is really that's something that I can't get my head around until I read a book by a guy called Joseph Heinrich yeah Joseph Heinrich is a Harvard anthropologist and economist and he's got a book called the secret of our success and what he does he's a biologist, an anthropologist, an economic historian, very brainy guy.

17:50And what he says is that what makes humans so successful is not our individual intelligence, but what he calls our collective brain. So what he looks at is how societies evolve. And what Heinrich makes the point is that because our collective brain is absolutely critical, the more of us that come into contact with each other, the more likely we are to come up with solutions to problems. His idea is basically, if you look at evolution, most scientists look at evolution as something physical. So our hands evolved from apes' hands for a variety of reasons and all that sort of stuff. But what Heinrich says is that that suggests that evolution stopped about 50 ,000 years ago.

18:41So our eyes were blue or whatever happens to be right but he says no that there's a thing called cultural evolution the humans never stop evolving and so societies that are isolated actually lose the ability to operate certain technologies because they're not coming into contact with other people who are prompting them to innovate and he makes the point that for example down here the aboriginal people or the Australian people in Tasmania who were discovered after the Aboriginal people in Australia seemed to be much, much less technologically advanced than even the Australian population here. And the idea is that the reason this was, was because Tasmania was the one part of Australia

19:35David McWilliams: that was actually attached to Australia. It was a bit like Florida in America. If you imagine in Bapha, Florida. And when the Ice Age happened, it got cut off. And the indigenous people who were living in Tasmania got cut off too. And so they were cut off from their hinterland for about 6 ,000 years. And they gradually forgot how to do things because they weren't being given the cultural impetus to continue to do things. And so that's in a microcosm of Australia versus Tasmania and the original people. And Australia is a macrocosm of an isolated population who weren't consistently being informed by and learning from others.

20:18And as a result of that, they went backwards evolutionary.

20:21David McWilliams: So when the Brits arrived here, they were like people that really were from the Stone Age. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, there wasn't the need, as we were saying before, for them to, they'd solve the problems that they needed to solve in order for them to live and to dance and to be happy. Well, can I just ask you then to just take that idea and broaden it, scale it up a bit. The population of the globe is growing. We're now at over 7 billion. You know, 20 years ago, we were only at 5 billion. And this is growing constantly. So does that mean that the more people on this planet means that we can solve more problems?

21:07Yes, definitely. So the more people there are here, we become or should become more innovative. Completely.

21:15David McWilliams: That's why I believe that AI, although I'm quite skeptical about it, we're actually going to talk about AI next week, John. I've got a very interesting, I think it's an interesting take, but I won't think it. It might not be interesting at all, right? But this is why I think AI will change the world because if AI makes more information available to more people, to be against AI means you're kind of like a medievalist, right? Yes, yeah. If you think that Joseph Henrich is right. So the secret of our success, by the way, have a look at that. Dear listener, if you're into all this sort of carry on, I love it.

21:48David McWilliams: What he's saying is that we never stop evolving. Yeah. The more of us are together, the more we evolve together. So it's basically humans teach each other. That we know. And it's hardly revolutionary, but we never kind of think about this. It's that idea that 100 heads are better than one. So if you, for example, give 100 people the responsibility of solving a problem, the chances of them coming up with a solution are better than there's just two. Now, why is that? It's because two people are limited by their own brains. 100 people are not. And then if you look at this, as you said, in the very macro term, the 7 billion people should solve problems more.

22:32And this is where, for example, like evolutionary biology and anthropology and economics kind of smash up against what I would call resources.

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23:08David McWilliams: Wayfair, every style, every home. Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk, and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at vanta.com.

23:40Which is the catechism of faith of the environmental movement that basically says there's X amount of resources in the world and eventually we will actually absorb them all, we'll use them all, we'll run out of them. And as a result of that, we're all doomed. This is the Greta Thunberg sort of world view, right? Yeah, it's a little oversimplified that.

24:01David McWilliams: But this is a podcast, you know, but it's the idea that, you know, that we will run out of things. And then the sort of humanistic idea is, well, maybe, maybe yes, but isn't it amazing how humans have managed to recreate, to multiply, etc., and live in the one place. Now, we can argue, as the cows come home, we'll just get back to Australia. Interestingly here, the resource environmentalist movement has been more accurate than the humanist movement because the history of Australia since Europeans arrived is the history of ecological catastrophe, meted out to the original inhabitants, either fauna, plants, and our animals, of these thousands and thousands of exotic invaders who've been introduced here.

24:56We talked to all fair, one of the most deleterious and problematic invader ever in Australia was the humble rabbit, John. Yeah, absolutely. And they didn't have a natural predator and they ate everything. And so did rats and mice. Yeah, rats and mice. And like I said, they had no natural predators. So they just, as the saying goes, they breed like rabbits. Yeah, exactly. And the population exploded. And hence you have this enormous fence, the rabbit-proof fence that runs the length from top to bottom in Australia. It's an incredible piece of simple infrastructure, but it's very effective.

25:38David McWilliams: On the rabbits issue, there was a man in 1895 called Thomas Austen, a fellow from Victoria, right? The state of Victoria. And he made a big mistake. He imported 24 wild rabbits from England and he decided to release them into the bush for sport. Right? 24 rabbits. God's sight. By 1880, two million acres of Victoria had been picked clean by the rabbits. Yeah. They just ate everything, right? 50 million years of isolation here had left Australia without a single predator that was even able to recognize what a rabbit was. And the rabbits started nibbling and nibbling and nibbling, right? And of course, the problem for Australia was that they were meant to be a sheep farm, right?

26:24Yeah.

26:24David McWilliams: But the rabbits were eating everything the sheeps were eating, right? Yeah, of course. So by 1890s, Australia fell into a murderous drought because the rabbits had eaten every piece of vegetation. they had basically cleared the place of greenery. And just threw the whole environment out of balance, out of whack. So in the next decade, think about this, right? The beginning of this century, 35 million sheep, more than half of the nation's total perished. 16 million of them died in one year, 1902. Why? Because of the rabbits. Wow. I mean, the sheep have no right to be there either, actually. They're just like woolly lawnmowers.

27:06David McWilliams: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But my point is the whole history, right? And of course, it was introduced in Ireland to mix mitosis and it killed all the rabbits. But my point is that the history of this bizarre place is the history of the collision between the outside world that was evolving, had immune systems that changed, had predators, had the ecological and anthropological legacy of years of evolution as we live with each other. This was a completely virgin area. And exactly the same thing happened when the Western people arrived here in the 1770s. They were looking at these Aborigines. The Aborigines seemed to be perfectly happy.

27:55But of course, when these two civilizations collide, only one wins and the winner were the Europeans. and that has really been the legacy of Australia. And John, this brings us to what you were talking to me about before, off-air, was the Schumpterian process of innovation and how it actually changes the world. Because the people who were left here isolated

28:24David McWilliams: did not have the Schumpterian impulses to innovate. And when the people from Europe arrived who had been living through Schumpterian impulses for hundreds of years, the clash of the civilizations was so extreme that you can only really put it down to, to come back to this idea of Heinrich, which is our collective intelligence, not our individual intelligence, because there's no evidence that the individual Aborigines were any less intelligent than the individual Englishmen. But the individual Englishmen had the benefit of years and years of social evolution together, which is why we arrived with guns and they tried to defend themselves with spears.

29:16David McWilliams: So let's talk about that after the break.

29:24So, Mac, you're sitting there in the jungle, pondering life. And anthropology and ecology and the whole bit. Now, you're talking about how the original Australians arrived in Australia and didn't go back. I mean, they found their place and they got on with it. But their evolution and their drive to evolve socially, economically, politically, the whole lot, kind of there was no need for it. So they didn't. but where did that deep human impulse for innovation and progress you know the stuff we talk about you know the gales of creative destruction and Schumpeter and all that kind of stuff where did that go that's a really good question right actually just before you answer that last week I was reading about the three guys who were awarded the Nobel Prize for economics and they were drawing on Schumpeter and talking about innovation and all that kind of stuff what

30:25David McWilliams: was your take on that can i just give you a thing right before john and i started doing this podcast if i had actually said john do you know the nobel prize for economics we don't always sitting in mckenna's right now he's telling me about who won the nobel prize i'm like oh what yes i've turned you you know you have like when i came i came out last week in brisbane i was turned and now you're turned i've come out as an economist exactly just far far more terrifying than coming out of it as anything else. Anyway, so it's interesting you say this because when I look at these flashes of civilizations, when I look at these great collisions that really happened when Europeans started to go out and begin to colonize the world, most of which was for all the wrong reasons, but it doesn't matter.

31:16This is what happens. History is history. We can't rewrite it. What I see is one civilization being so much more dominant than the other. And then I ask the question, why? And one of the main ideas in money, the story of humanity, which I'm down here to talk about, is the idea that money is this incredibly brilliant social technology that brings humans together, allows us to collaborate and cooperate at scale. And as a result of that, you've seen money go hand in hand with many other things that we would describe as human civilization or human progress because it was the foundational organizational technology that allowed us to do all these things.

32:05It brought out the best and the worst in us, right? Yeah, yeah. But let's just talk about what it brought out. It brought an innovative side. It allowed us to dream. It allowed us to animate our desires. It allowed us to try out things. It gave us the framework to value innovation. That framework gave us a financial framework to value innovation. That's the first thing. When the British arrived here, they were a society that was the product of a monetary society for a thousand years by the time they arrived here. Don't forget, actually for 1700 years, the Romans were in Britain. The Romans introduced the monetary society to Britain at the time of Christ.

32:52Yeah. Well, it was actually 70 AD, right? So for 1700 years, the British people were the product of a society whose organizational technology was money. and that can explain a lot of the so-called progress, right? When they arrived here, they smashed into a society that had no money, the Aboriginal society. They had no money. They had no possessions. They had no sense of ownership. They had no sense of organization. They didn't even seem to have a hierarchical structure within the tribes. They didn't even have any houses. They slept out in the bush on their own. They slept wherever they wanted to do.

33:34So these two unbelievably diverse societies, it's as if a pre-Sumerian civilization crashed into the civilization that had produced Shakespeare. Think about that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what you're thinking about. So it's a Stone Age civilization crashed into the society that had produced William Shakespeare. And there was only one winner there, right? And if you take that as a microcosm, then you begin to start to explain, well, where does innovation come from? Where does the economy grow from? And this is your point about the Nobel Prize winners. These Nobel Prize winners talk about creativity.

34:12Now, I'm going to just tell you, I don't think these guys were that clever at all, right? Machia, who wrote a good book on the British Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, was fine. But I don't think they captured exactly what's going on. But they got a Nobel Prize nonetheless. Yeah, go on and explain that a little. Because I think there's two sides. We'll finish the podcast. So there's two sides with creativity. creativity. One is what I call the psychological side, and one is the sociological side. So the psychological side is there's a certain type of person that pushes the boundaries.

34:44Now, we're not too sure who those people are. We're not too sure when they're born, can we actually forecast that they're going to be these type of people. But people like, for example, Einstein, right? Just take Einstein as a good example. Born a great mathematician, but he had something else. There were lots of great mathematicians. Einstein ended up a celebrity. He was a public figure. He loved the limelight. He was a performer. As well as being an amazing mathematician and an amazing physicist, he also had something else. And that's something else that Einstein had was this weird personality he had so that he became the most famous person in the world in the 1920s and 30s, right?

35:23So that's the psychological idea that it takes one-off people. Like we mentioned John Lennon earlier on. You know, John Lennon and Paul McCartney came together and for a period of five or six years, they wrote better music than anybody else. Now, why is that? What was the chemistry between those two guys? Yeah, there was a spark. 21, 22, 23, there was a chemistry. There was something, both of them brilliant in their own way. I happen to think McCartney much more brilliant because I think Lennon's a spoofer, but that's neither here nor there, right? So that's one thing, okay? Imagine all the possessions.

35:54Imagine no possessions. Go on. That's another podcast we need

35:58David McWilliams: to come back to go on imagine no possessions but a flat in the upper east side anyway right so but i think there's something else going on there's also what i would call the sociological impact so the psychological impact is that individuals make a difference but the sociological impact is that societies that ennoble those individuals get rewarded with great creativity Right. And so it's a society that ennobles, confers dignity, doesn't sneer upon those individuals. It's a society that works. And I'm going to conclude this by thinking about our society that we were brought up in. In the 1970s and 1980s, Ireland was a sneering society.

36:42It sneered at people who stepped out of the ordinary. It sneered at people who failed commercially. It sneered at people who failed artistically. The collective bias of the society was to humiliate the dissenters, to humiliate the outsiders, and to basically say, you're not one of us. We're all part of this tribe. the boring, dull, repetitive. Get back in line. Get back in your lane, as the Yanks say. As a result of this, Ireland did nothing. For the first 70 years of our independence, we were the worst performing economy in Europe. Not the second worst, third worst, fourth worst. The worst. I think it's because sociologically, we were ruled by people who were threatened by dissenters.

37:28As the society gets more comfortable with itself, as it becomes more open, what you get is you reap the creative rewards of the sociological bias of the society. Yeah. And I believe this is what happens. And I don't think, I think the Nobel Prize winners didn't really get that right. This is the essential chemistry. And what you're saying there then is that it's the likes of Australia is that kind of society. America is that kind of society. Yes. Yes. Europe, and this is what the Americans in particular, the J.D. Vance of the world, you know, pointing the finger at Europe is that we were there at one stage, but then we've become old, tired, and complacent.

38:11David McWilliams: Now, I don't believe this is true. I think this is a narrative that the Yanks are spinning to suit themselves. Right. But we'll come back to it. Because I think that, you know, the Yanks are saying, oh, we produce all the technology and we're like, nobody gives a shit who produces it as long as we use it. The great thing about the world is it's porous. So you and I are talking to each other from Australia on an Apple Mac, my Apple Mac, which is American technology. We're only making that technology better because we're using it. The technology itself isn't that important. Right, okay. The Americans have to sell it to us.

38:45Yeah, yeah, yeah.

38:46David McWilliams: I think this idea that, oh my good God, you know, we produce the technology, therefore we're fab. No, you produce the technology and we use it. We're fab. Yes, we are, Mac. Yes, we are. Yes, no, no, but okay. Anyway, John, we will conclude. We will conclude. Yes. The Shumptarian message and lesson from Australia is that people learn from each other. There is a thing called the collective brain. The collective brain is animated by not isolation, but by assimilation and meeting of other people. The reason the aboriginals here were regarded as Stone Age people when the English arrived is because the collective brain didn't grow.

39:32David McWilliams: What is most fascinating about them is that 60 ,000 years ago, they were cleverer than anybody else. Yeah. They were the people who sailed here. This is what intrigues me. So they were the people who were cleverer than anybody else in the world. They had sailing technology that nobody else had, and they lost it. Yeah. Why did they lose it? They forgot it. Why did they forgot it? Because as you said, they didn't have any need to innovate. And it's that almost neurotic need to innovate that propels us forward. And speaking of neuroticism, I'm now going to go on a beach and feel incredibly neurotic, very, very white, very pink, and really a member of a subhuman category of individuals.

40:15David McWilliams: Watch out for them spiders. Called an Irish man on an Aussie beach. I'll talk to you next week.

40:40We'll see you next time.

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